Remember a little while ago I reviewed another grindcore album, and was talking about how it should be fun and not taken so seriously? Well I think I may have to retract that statement. So here I am, once again reading through the band's bio and info from the press release. I read "a vicious onslaught of grind noise, overbearing distortion and shrieking vocals along with a twisted dash of melody."

Sounds fucking awesome right?

Wrong.

The music here, if you can call it that, is a mixture of black metal, cybergrind and children's hymn style melodic guitar parts. Also known as a "musical spermdumpster", the blistering ear slaughter that is Beaten To Death's Dødsfest is about 19 minutes of blasting drums, (performed by Christian Svendsen of Tsjunder) way too fuzzed guitar, click-y bass and god-awful shrieks and gutturals. The drums are enjoyable, they blast, the fill, they even come close to D-beat. This is really to be expected of a drummer of such caliber. Unfortunately that's where the positive stops. The guitar tone is so frail and over fuzzed that it ends up sounding like a poor connection in a set of headphones, or perhaps a bee buzzing its way by. The bass is audible, but it really shouldn't be, it's full of awful clicking and noise. It really detracts from the appeal of such a nice instrument. Then we have the vocals. They range from literally laughable gutturals to cover-your-ear pitched shrieks. The production is also very lacklustre. It is far too linear and not nearly dynamic enough. The difference from the high funky clean guitar parts and the distorted buzz is nil. Causing the clean parts to fade and lose any of their shock factor.

In the end I understand what the band was trying to do. All they wanted was to release some fun, wacky grindcore. However, even with a not so serious theme, the music should at least be decent.

Gotta agree with you here. At first I thought "This is interesting and might need a bit of time to sink in and enjoy" but nope... It's still interesting but not in a good way.
I can see what they were trying to do but these guys should leave the wacky grindcore to the experts like the now-disbanded Japanische Kampfhörspiele.

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Written by BloodTears on 19.08.2011 at 18:29Like you could kiss my ass